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Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

Now and then, I get a little discouraged by the state of my health data. Like providers, I’m frustrated as heck by the number of independent data sources I must access to get a full picture of my medications, care and health status. These include:

That’s not all – I’m sure I could think of other tools, interfaces and apps – but it offers a good idea of what I face. And I’m pretty sure I’m not unusual in this regard, so we’re talking about a big issue here.

By the way, bear in mind I’m not just talking about hyperportalotus – a fun term for the state of having too many portals to manage – but rather, a larger problem of data coordination. Even if all of my providers came together and worked through a shared single portal, I’d still have to juggle many tools for tracking and documenting my care.

The bottom line is that given the obstacles I face, my self-care process is very inefficient. And while we spend a lot of time talking about clinician workflow (which, of course, is quite important) we seldom talk about patient/consumer health workflow. But it’s time that we did.

Building a patient workflow

A good initial step in addressing this problem might be to create a patient self-care workflow builder and make it accessible website. Using such a tool, I could list all of the steps I need to take to manage my conditions, and the tool would help me develop a process for doing so effectively.

For example, I could “tell” the software that I need to check the status of my prescriptions once a week, visit certain doctors once a month, check in about future clinical visits on specific days and enter my data in my medication management app twice a day. As I did this, I would enter links to related sites, which would display in turn as needed.

This tool could also display critical web data, such as the site compiling the blood sugar readings from my husband’s connected blood glucose monitor, giving patients like me the ability to review trends at a glance.

I haven’t invented the wheel here, of course. We’re just talking about an alternate approach to a patient portal. Still, even this relatively crude approach – displaying various web-based sources under one “roof” along with an integrated process – could be quite helpful.

Eventually, health IT wizards could build much more sophisticated tools, complete with APIs to major data sources, which would integrate pretty much everything patients need first-hand. This next-gen data wrangler would be able to create charts and graphs and even issue recommendations if the engine behind it was sophisticated enough.

Just get started

All that being said, I may be overstating how easy it would be to make such a solution work. In particular, I’m aware that integrating a tool with such disparate data sources is far, far easier said than done. But why not get started?

After all, it’s hard to overestimate how much such an approach would help patients, at least those who are comfortable working with digital health solutions. Having a coordinated, integrated tool in place to help me manage my care needs would certainly save me a great deal of time, and probably improve my health as well.

I urge providers to consider this approach, which seems like a crying need to me. The truth is, most of the development money is going towards enabling the professionals to coordinate and manage care. And while that’s not a bad thing, don’t forget us!

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